Snapchat Will Release Its First Piece Of Hardware This Fall

Unless you’re into marketing and business development, it’s unlikely that you would have guessed that Snapchat would release any kind of physical product. However, that’s exactly what they’re doing this fall as they rebrand the company name to Snap, Inc. in order to reflect their expansion.

Spectacles is a wearable device that doubles as sunglasses, and will inevitably be compared to Google Glass, that takes Snapchats from your point of view. It differs from the phone app in that it gives a realistic representation of your field of view using a 115-degree lens and circular video.

“When I got the footage back and watched it, I could see my own memory, through my own eyes — it was unbelievable,” Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel told the Journal, recalling a hike he took wearing the prototype. “It’s one thing to see images of an experience you had, but it’s another thing to have an experience of the experience. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like I was there again.”

Spectacles will launch sometime in the fall for around $130 and is being marketed as a “toy,” a characterization Verge points out that the flagship app shared until it gained “150 million daily users and a valuation in the tens of billions.”

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